This is an unpaywalled version of an essay from early 2025, unlocked for you to enjoy while I plough my way through several deadlines. If you enjoy this essay, consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can make more time to write them!
There are some authors that haunt other writers. They appear around the time that you first get published. The identity of your particular spectre will be tied in some way to your work, but mostly to your race, gender, location, background. The imagination of critics sometimes stretches not to your actual writing, but to whichever famous author you can most easily be compared to. These ghosts linger around you at the start of your career, when no one has really got a sense of you yet but needs to pigeonhole you, and if you’re unlucky they’ll stick and be there forever. What I’m telling you is this: a hell of a lot of white female writers under 40 have found themselves haunted by Angela Carter.
I had my first comparison to Carter before I’d ever read a single one of her books, and certainly before I had developed enough skill for this to be anything other than wildly offensive to her. A lot of us go through a period of interest in folk stories, especially at the start of our careers, and especially if we’ve had an education that focused on the female element of such stories. They make sense, as a place to start. But the Carter comparison is slapped on then, and quickly sticks, no matter what your treatment of folk tales really is or how quickly you move on from it. All cheap comparisons, too eagerly made, eventually diminish the greater name; Angela Carter deserves more, I think, than just being the patron saint of unimaginative white female emerging writers.
Last week I read a wonderful write up of a new Brothers Grimm autobiography in the London Review of Books; the book is written by Ann Schmiesing, the review was by Colin Burrow. Of course, Carter was evoked in this article, as she always must be when discussing anything fairy-tale. As part of a rich discussion of the Grimms and their legacy, Burrow drew attention to Carter’s subversion of the original Bluebeard story in her book The Bloody Chamber, in which she has the final victim’s mother arrive to save her from her serial murderer husband. But the subversion was not quite Burrow’s focus:
The uneasy but repeated fascination with sexual humiliation in many of Carter’s versions of folk tales, for instance, is probably not quite the explicit content she would have wanted to put in them, and has sometimes made her readers squeamish… Why unlock the chamber you know is forbidden and which you suspect must be bloody unless some part of you wants to be hurt?
As my friend Camilla noted, this is a very odd point. It is strange to assume that anything a person puts in a book—a project in which they agonise over every word, every possible reading, every formulation of meaning—is there accidentally. But it is particularly strange to assume that Angela Carter wasn’t aware of the theme of sexual humiliation in her stories, because this is a writer who is intensely interested in the sharp edges of women’s experience of desire, of what lies underneath when you scratch through the female flesh of social niceties and obligation, of how sex in fiction can be used to hide social and cultural critique. She herself said that, in The Bloody Chamber, she was taking ‘the latent content of those traditional stories and using that; and the latent content is violently sexual.’ As Jenny Turner notes, in a 2016 LRB article, Carter sometimes referred to herself as a ‘moral pornographer’. She was interested in women’s fascination with sexual danger; she was interested in sadomasochism. In fact, in the same year that she brought out the book in question, The Bloody Chamber, she also brought out a book specifically around sadism. As in, literally about the work of the Marquis de Sade.
The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, published in the UK in 1979, is my favourite of the Carter books I’ve read, probably in part because it was, to me, so completely unexpected. Carter, like all dead female writers, is shorn of her radicalism in contemporary discourse, and so her name becomes blandly synonymous with retellings of folk tales rather than, for instance, with intense intellectual discussion of one of the most controversial writers in modern history, or with the fact that she used the money from her Somerset Maugham Award to leave her first husband and move to Japan.
Speaking on the BBC’s The Verb in 2012, Marina Warner—one of the scholars who has insisted on taking Carter’s work seriously throughout her career—described this book as being about ‘desire and its destruction, the self-immolation of women’. One of the first titles commissioned by the newly established feminist press Virago, the book stood out against the general feminist writing of the time, which was vehemently anti-pornography (as much of it is now). Carter knew that she was playing with fire even as she wrote it. Its publication managed to irritate radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, who dismissed it as a ‘pseudofeminist literary essay’; fellow anti-pornography feminist Susanne Kappeler similarly derided the book as failing to achieve a feminist analysis. Carter’s response, according to Edmund Gordon, was this:
If I can get up Susanne Kappeler’s nose, to say nothing of the Dworkin proboscis, then my living has not been in vain.
This was not the only time Carter’s work rubbed up against these women, as Dworkin—a woman who never met a sweeping statement she didn’t like—believed that fairy tales, ‘the first scenarios of women and men which mould our psyches’, oppress women, entrenching gender stereotypes. Carter, rather, saw fairy tales as a way to imagine societal change, and an expression of the conscious or unconscious desires of the time. She saw the form as an exploratory one, open to change and rework and modernisation, whereas Dworkin considered them fundamentally anti-woman. For me, it’s difficult not to see echoes here of the most vicious contemporary feminist arguments, with one side insisting on adaptability and the possibility of change, of listening and altering, and the other insisting on closing doors and maintaining positions. I recall the launch of a young feminist magazine I went to close to a decade ago, where the twenty-something women on stage, expressing solidarity with sex workers fighting for safer environments, were subjected to a barrage of abuse from older feminists (who had posed the question specifically to elicit this response) at the back of the audience, with the older group quite literally screaming at the young women about rape and prostitution and abuse. As Jenny Turner notes, it is often not men that feminists find themselves in greatest dispute with:
Time and time again, the really poisonous conflict is with the women of the preceding generation, the ground they gave and the mistakes they made in loving themselves and their daughters.
This misses a point, however: just as often, the conflict is with the following generation, and the ground that they are perceived to be giving. Every generation that was once the younger becomes the older, and the cycle continues. Just as no two siblings have the same parents, no two generations of feminists come up in the same world. One grows up without access to contraception; the next with easy access to it. One grows up with hard-fought abortion rights; the next finds them cruelly snatched away. One comes of age in a world where white middle class feminists were the only ones allowed public stage, and so took that opportunity; the next attempts to make space for marginalised voices and to shift focus towards those most vulnerable. That we manage to build connections between these generations at all should be cause for celebration.
To radical feminists, Carter was be a pariah, a non-feminist. By daring to interrogate such a writer as Sade, she had committed a sin against women. Angela Carter, like all women, can’t seem to speak or write without attracting ire from all sides; she was criticised by Patricia Duncker—the gloriously eccentric and brilliant woman who taught the Gothic fiction class I took at university, which changed my entire life—for never imagining ‘Cinderella in bed with the Fairy God-mother’. But Carter was not above directing ire at female writers too; Turner notes that she:
was often vehement in her dislike of slightly older women writers, such as Joan Didion, Edna O’Brien and Jean Rhys, whom she claimed to find victim-like.
It is, of course, a tale as old as time. The wisdom of the previous generations can weigh heavy on the young, who do not wish to acknowledge their own vulnerability. It is precisely Carter’s experience of the preceding generation that led her to such a dislike of perceived victimhood. She adored her maternal grandmother, who the family moved in with during the war; Angela’s most formative years were spent in in Wath-upon-Dearne, just five minutes from where I would later grow up. Her relationship with her mother was much more strained; startlingly and perhaps oppressively protective of her (much) younger second child, Olive not only once suggested she might go and live with Angela if she got into Oxford (surely the last thing any striving young woman wants) but also saw it as her duty to keep the young adult Angela away from boys. Angela, in turn, began to fight with her mother for control over her own body. As her mother encouraged her towards cream cakes and rich, youthful treats, Angela was taking up smoking as a means to lose weight and prowling for a man, almost any man, who would fuck her. And so she found herself married before she was twenty-one, freed from the realm of her family and trapped into that of a wife. Is there any wonder where her interest as sex as a political frame came from? Why she might have been fascinated by sexual humiliation, or the power dynamics and context of the erotic, or sex as a means to self-harm? Under the title of the first chapter of The Sadeian Woman, a ‘polemical preface’ she called ‘Pornography in the Service of Women’, Carter quotes both Foucault and Fanon; from the latter, she borrows the line ‘I am not the slave of the Slavery that dehumanised my ancestors’. Shots fired.
From the very preface of the book, Carter sets out the way she views pornography, which could not differ more from that of Dworkin and her other contemporaries. For Carter, all pornography derived from myth, and featured mythic abstractions of male and female, as far from real people as it was possible to be. The ‘getting’ of a woman by a man; the man approaching a reclining woman on his knees, erect; the laying of a woman down in the fertile soil; for Carter it is all an attempt to engage in ‘spurious charade of maleness and femaleness’. [It’s at this point I must remind you that we’re talking about seventies pornography; I’m not sure what Carter would make of the cumguzzling, gangbanging, forced feminisation pornography of today. But I would love to know.]
In other words, both fairy tales and pornography are works of fantasy. And it is through this lens that she sees pornography as ripe for improvement, just as she sees fairy tales and their gendered narratives as ripe for rework. The real world of sex, she writes, is not free from the weight of mythology, economics, history; she sees wives as people who ‘fuck by contract’, and that sex workers are merely more open about the economic aspect of their congress. She writes that the job of pornography is sometimes to educate but mostly to titillate, and that in doing so, it ‘reinforces the false universals of sexual archetype because it denies… the social context in which sexual activity takes place’. This loss of the real world means we cannot reappraise it through this artform, and makes pornography an ‘affectless form of daydreaming’, serving to ‘defuse the explosive potential of all sexuality’—which is why it is directed towards men, the politically dominant minority. Pornography, she says, keeps sex ‘under the carpet. That is, outside everyday human intercourse.’
This is a very subtle but distinct shift in our understanding. According to Carter, pornography is obscene not because it shows sex, but because it shows sex in regressive archetype only, shorn of all its political context and therefore its political possibility. That it forces sex into a covered world away from our normal lives, as if it is a grotesquerie, as if it is by nature indecent. But also that it enforces biologically essentialist understandings of maleness and femaleness; man, giver, penetrator, dominator; woman, receiver, penetrated dominated. It is here that we start to see the cracks through which her embrace of the Marquis de Sade’s work appear.
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was born in Paris in 1740, the only surviving child of a noble family that could trace its blood to the king of France. He was spoiled and violent, sent to be raised by a libertine priest uncle; his mother eventually left his father and moved into a convent. He was a soldier, a gambler, a husband and father, a sexual deviant; one of his first imprisonments was for blasphemy and ‘incitement to sacrilege’, after he forced a sex worker to trample on a crucifix at gunpoint and tried to get her to engage in sodomy (he had already masturbated with a crucifix while blaspheming, something I can’t think about without laughing). Subsequent sexual scandals included the whipping and brutalising of a housekeeper who he attempted to keep locked up in a room, and an orgy with four sex workers and his manservant which involved a lot of sodomy (a capital offence) as well as flagellation and the poisoning of the sex workers with cantharidin, better known as Spanish fly, for which the two men were sentenced to death.
He managed to avoid capture for a period, hiring either sex workers or servants—of both sex, and some as young as fifteen—who he then used for orgies, with flogging being a major part of the activities. After one such affair, his wife sent their young female servants away to convents to recover from their injuries; its clear he deserved the legacy of his name, for he was inarguably a sexually violent man. Eventually his death sentence was reduced to imprisonment and he was finally held in Vincennes prison, in the Bastille and then in an insane asylum, and it was in these places that he began to write his infamous works.
It is the works, and not the crimes, that have really cemented his place in history; after all, in Sade’s time the marriageable age in France was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, meaning what we’d now consider the abuse of young teenagers was far from unusual, and Catholic-tinged sexual perversion as is old as time. After his release from prison he was active in politics (again, not exactly a realm free from sexual deviancy), first supporting a constitutional monarchy and then moving to a more radical republican position before being arrested for not being revolutionary enough. His final imprisonment was not for any sexual violence, rape or abuse but for pornography, or more properly for ‘immorality’, and he was detained without trail, declared insane and held captive for the rest of his life. By the time he died, he had spent almost half of his days in prison.
His crimes, in the realm of literature, were as follows: he wrote extremely explicit, sexually violent novels (and non-pornographic plays, essays, travel journals and political treatises, many of which were philosophical in nature). His name is synonymous with what are referred to as his ‘libertine’ novels: 120 Days of Sodom, Philosophy in the Boudoir, Justine and Juliette. The former is his most infamous work, despite it being unfinished, perhaps because of the extent of its depravity and because its author wrote it while imprisoned in the Bastille, rolling up the scroll and hiding it in the cell walls so it might not be discovered. Its plot has little outside of the sexual, and the published version degrades from prose into simple notes as it goes on, which, actually, adds a meta level to the implication that the four male protagonists have completely lost themselves to the worst depravities ever conceived. The story goes like this: four rich libertines lock themselves in a castle with twelve accomplices, twenty victims (including their own daughters) and ten servants. They spend four months attempting to reach the ultimate sexual gratification with no holds barred, which leads to every possible transgression and violence you can imagine, and ends with torture and murder. Justine and Juliette tell more traditionally-structured but no less explicit tales of two women, one virtuous and one not (their full titles are Justine, or Good Conduct Well-Chastised and Juliette, or Vice Amply Rewarded) and Philosophy in the Boudoir is primarily a philosophical dialogue wherein the two protagonists defend libertinism as the only system that mirrors and reinforces revolution, and then put that sexual libertinism into action.
The reason so many writers end up coming back to Sade as a point of interest is that he was, fundamentally, interesting. A nobleman who managed to scandalise himself so much he was cast out, his political views encompassed the following: a denial of the right to property, libertarianism bordering on anarchism, an analysis of state power that might be called socialist, a belief in state-funded brothels (which Dworkin insisted was a call for enforced prostitution from childhood onwards), atheism, materialism, libertinism, hedonism. For Carter, though, it’s the sexual extremity of his writing and his treatment of his female characters, all of which is against a political backdrop, that makes him worthy of deep consideration; he is utilising pornography to ‘make a particularly wounding satire on mankind, and the historical time in which the novels are set is essential to the satire.’ Carter writes that Sade’s work—often dismissed as grotesque and immoral—is:
of particular significance to women, because of his refusal to see female sexuality in relation to its reproductive function, a refusal as unusual in the late eighteenth century as it is now.
This is inarguable; the women in Sade’s books are intensely sexual beings, both used and using. They enjoy all the sexual freedom that his male characters do, and they are given status and agency as well; they are good, they are evil, they are punished and they mete out violence on others too. His novels are all about power, and what the expression of power looks like; his women are brutalised when they are subjected to this power, but they are also brutalised by it when they gain it. They, too, become as cruel as the men who raped and mutilated them. In this way he shows power as something that is not only held but taken; the power of one person requires the degradation of another. As Carter puts it, ‘a free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.’ I find myself stunned at how much this line, published in 1979, mirrors our most anti-imperialist, socially-engaged slogans of today.
Of course, there is violence against the women, in these books. There is violence against men. Almost all the characters are physically active with both men and women, sexually free in every sense, good and bad. The worlds of Sade’s books are nihilistic, extreme, perverse; good women are destroyed and bad men and women prevail. They careen into the depths of depravity; at the end of 120 Days of Sodom, the last tale is that of the ‘hell libertine’, who is physically stimulated by servants while being mentally stimulated by the murder of fifteen girls. Considering this character, I can’t help but think of the God-Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer 40k, who has to consume the souls of one thousand ‘psykers’ per day. These two characters have the same function; to highlight that the excesses of the most powerful come at the expense of the many, and an increasing amount of them; that all-consuming power requires mass consumption. Is this not a social critique? I fail to see how it cannot be.
Is Sade, then—a man who came from great privilege, who knew the brutal effects of the power he held over those beneath him socially, and gave into these base impulses time and time again—offering up a view of the world that, while extreme, reflects the way that privilege and power actually work? And with these books, was he inciting us to overthrow these societies, for the betterment of not only women but all from the underprivileged classes? Carter believes so, and she believes that in doing so he is using pornography for moral ends:
The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual license of all the genders… Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it.
This is an argument that many would make today. A couple of months ago I went to see the production of Annie Ernaux’s The Years at the Harold Pinter Theatre in London; the play had to be stopped twice due to audience reactions to an explicit scene around a back-street abortion, fake blood streaming down the actress’s forearms. This work is explicit, and its intent is to shock. But we argue that this is moral, because it highlights the violence done, to women, by the system that forced them into the hands of such unregulated abortion providers. Similarly we read novels and memoirs and watch films in which abuse is explicitly shown, to highlight that such abuses occur and stimulate us to change things. Does this make them immoral? We don’t appear to think so. We seem to believe that extremity is justified if the intent is critique rather than exploitation.
Carter makes the point that pornography is tolerated in society whereby it upholds the prevailing sexual modes of it; where it breeches or overturns these, it is banned. According to this reading, Sade’s work was banned not because it was grotesquely explicit (which it truly is; once, reading 120 Days of Sodom on a bus in Cambodia, I put the book down, sighed, closed my eyes, and thought: just please, please stop shitting in each other’s mouths) but because it exposed society’s inherent misogyny, its treatment of women as economic and sexual tokens. In these books he creates, as she says:
a model of hell, in which the gratification of sexuality involves the infliction and the tolerance of extreme pain. He describes sexual relations in the context of an unfree society as the expression of pure tyranny… the one constant to all Sade’s monstrous orgies is that the whip hand is always the hand with the real political power and the victim is a person who has little or no power at all, or has had it stripped from him. In this schema, male means tyrannous and female means martyrised, no matter what the official genders of the male and female beings are.
Dworkin, of course, did not agree. Carter’s glorification of Sade, she said, was a glorification of violence against women. I don’t know what is to be gained of simplifying and flattening literary works to this degree; in order for it to be true you have to take Sade’s works not as satirical or provocative but as basically honest representations of this man, and all men’s, sexual desires; you have to imagine that Donatien Alphonse François wanted women to squat on tables and shit in his mouth, wanted to drink vomit, to rape infants and commit incest, to disembowel pregnant women and rip the fingers off girls and skin children, and that his aim in writing such things down was mere confession, a masochistic impulse to give his jailers yet more reason to keep him imprisoned. You have to look at these grotesquely sexual books, which are stripped of any erotic or attractive element, and think not that the intent is to use sex to show the depravity of political and economic circumstance but that the man who wrote them simply had desires that were fundamentally inhuman. And that he was stupid enough to want to publish them in book form.
This insistence on ludicrous simplicity, on a rejection of nuance or complexity or intent or meaning beyond the superficial is both anti-art and anti-people. It insists on a uncomplicated world that does not exist, and it strips us of the ability to reformulate society in a way that embraces and benefits all who suffer within it.
What I love about Carter most is her refusal to be told what she can and can’t write about, what she can and can’t think, how she can and can’t appraise both art and society. She dismisses the easy position and instead approaches even taboo topics from a good-faith angle, assuming above all else that the writer of this work was doing something deeper than others would have you believe. And in doing so she demands more for her own work, too. She refuses to be conceptualised as that same mythic pornographic woman, diminished to the sum of her physical parts. I will leave you with this, from The Sadeian Woman, because Carter outlines her position, and mine, better than I ever could:
Anatomy is destiny, said Freud, which is true enough as far as it goes, but ambiguous. My anatomy is only part of an infinitely complex organisation, my self. The anatomical reductionalism of graffiti, the reductio ad absurdum of the bodily differences between men and women, extracts all the evidence of me from myself and leaves behind only a single aspect of my life as a mammal. It enlarges this aspect, simplifies it and then presents it as the most significant aspect of my entire humanity… In the face of this symbolism, my pretensions to any kind of social existence go for nothing; graffiti directs me back to my mythic generation as a woman and, as a woman, my symbolic value is primarily that of a myth of patience and receptivity, a dumb mouth from which the teeth have been pulled.
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